CSI West Region Leadership Conference Fall 2016

The CSI West Region is composed of CSI Chapters in the states of California, Hawaii and Nevada and is organized to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas to further the purposes of the Construction Specifications Institute in the region and at the chapter level.

The West Region conducts a yearly leadership training conference to provide chapter officers, board members and committee chairs with tools and insights to be more effective in the operation of their chapters. This fall, the leadership training was held in Southern California. The East Bay Oakland chapter had several new board members attend the training.

The conference is preceded by a West Region Board meeting on Friday to discuss and vote on West Region business. The following is a brief outline of this weekend’s activities.

Saturday, November 5, 2016

Paul Kane, West Region President welcomed the leadership conference attendees.

Ed Buch, of the Los Angeles chapter, kicked of the morning session with an overview of the schedule and description of presenters and topics for the day, the coaching sessions that would take place in the afternoon and the Sunday group strategic planning activity. He said it is important that all attendees exchange information, especially if they are a new leader, and to ask questions about chapter operations. We made self-introductions of all attendees, giving our Name, Chapter and role, and what type of work we do. Ed reviewed the following key points.

Leaders;

Leaders make the chapters successful, help the chapter define success, keeping members in the chapter and attracting new members.

Leaders must plan for their successors on chapter boards and committees, find them and help them to improve on the previous leaders effort.

Leaders recruit volunteers and convince them to participate actively.

Leaders must do their work, and share the load with other chapter leaders.

Membership;

Why join CSI?- some reasons for joining CSI

Professional growth

Technical information

New business contacts

Why do members keep their CSI membership? –

Think they are getting money’s worth

Satisfied with results

Because of personal relationships/friendships

Every chapter leader is responsible for membership retention and growth, not just the membership chair

Talk to about why you joined CSI

Have a membership table at all events

Keep membership applications with you as you visit colleagues

Contact members with upcoming renewal due dates

Contact non-renewals to find out why they did not renew

Contact members that do not attend events and find out why

Sue Bowman– Sue is the new CSI Director of Marketing and Membership

Sue came out from Virginia to join us and share what is going on at CSI Institute offices. The last two years have been challenging for CSI at the Institute level. The Executive Director and other members of Institute staff left CSI. There were management and operations problems, especially with the IT system and website, that are still being resolved.

A new CEO was brought on board last year and a thorough business review of CSI operations, Mission and Goals was conducted, resulting in a new “Policy Governance” style of management. The Mission and Goals are outlined as follows;

BROADEST “ENDS” STATEMENT:

CSI exists so that:

Members enjoy an environment conducive to realizing their full professional potential –

(with results optimizing return on available resources)

PRIORITY RESULTS

(1 thru 5, not reflecting any order of priority)

Members have building information and project delivery knowledge.

The construction industry recognizes CSI as the leading technical resource for the built environment.

CSI’s credentials are recognized as “gold standards” of competence.

Members engage in a robust community of related professions and organizations.

Members receive exclusive benefits and discounts on CSI products, programs and services.

Sue advised that the CSI Institute staff are dedicated to providing customer service and listening to the CSI membership, while working within a realistic budget. She wants to know what the chapter boards need from Institute, to help support our efforts in delivering valuable services to all CSI members. CSI will be improving information delivery to members, moving away from publications and more into digital delivery that is stable, mobile and state of the art. This leadership training conference was Sue’s first face to face interaction with chapters. Other key points;

CSI has rolled out a new website, csiresources.org that will eventually replace the old csinet.org website.

CSI is embarking on a study to help determine the value of the Certification programs (some of the funding is from the NSF). This will provide information to help CSI move certification education into college level courses. There is a new Manager of Certification for CSI.

Cathy Stegmaier is new Chapter Relations manager. Matt Fochs, who has been a help to us all over the years, has a new position as Technical Services Manager.

Valerie Harris of the Los Angeles chapter led a review and open discussion of chapter operations;

The late afternoon session we broke up into coaching sessions on various topics.

Awards

Chapter level; use the Outstanding Chapter Commendation criteria as a checklist for chapter operations. Every chapter should apply. Keep you awards programs brief. Describe what the award is being given for, what specifically did the individual do for the chapter. Be aware of due dates for submitting awards.

Region level-Best of the West, Frank Smith, Jim Butler, Wilber Johnston awards, check the West Region web site for kinds of awards and submit proper information by the deadline.

Institute awards, OCC, every chapter should submit, big criteria is to increase membership, other criteria should be easily achieved. Fellowship, requires much work and documentation, explain the story of the individuals impact on the construction industry. Submit on time.

Social Media

See the hand out and reference to the EBO blog on Social Media.

Chapter Website

Mitch Lawrence gave a tutorial of how the LA website was set up, host, website program, how to manipulate data.

Programs and Membership

Budgeting

Setting up a Chapter Newsletter

Certification

Effective Fundraising

Survey Monkey for Elections

Sue closed us out for the day with thoughts to prepare for tomorrows strategic planning exercise.

Strategic planning is really the process of planning. Focus not so much on the planning but what your goals are. Consider the following five questions;

Where are we now?

What is changing in our environment that will affect us? (technology, politics, environmental requirements, etc.). What is in our control/what is not in our control?

Where do we want to be? Think in terms of short term and long term goals

How do we get there?

How do we know when we get there (and was it worth it)?

Sunday, November 6, 2016

Ed gave a recap of attendees, he noted the following about the attendees; 18 Architects, 14 Product reps, 2 Contractors, 1 Other. A good mix. Attendees CSI membership duration; 4 – less than 5 years; 12 – 5 to 10 years; 3 – 11 to 15 years, 16 over 16 years.

Paul talked about the upcoming West – Northwest Region Conferences, Seattle 2017, Alaska 2018, LA 2019 . The West Region has been having Bi and Tri region conferences the last few years to help share cost and resources of putting on these events. San Diego included WR,NWR and SWR; Spokane WR, NWR.

Valerie kicked of the planning exercise. We worked in groups and tackled issues each group wanted to work on. Each group was to apply the five questions that Sue reviewed with us yesterday.

Our group was comprised of Dan, Jerry, Tim, Joel from EBO and Monique from LA. We worked on Increasing Membership Participation in Chapter Events.

Where are We Now?

We discussed the current state of our dinner meeting attendance at both the EBO and LA chapters. Based on our collective observations, the two chapters have similar percentages of total attendance and a similar breakdown based on the type of member/attendee category.

The percentage of members who attend meetings is approximately 25%-30% of total chapter membership.

The types of attendee categories were described as;

Chapter leaders who attend meetings regularly

Chapter members who attend meetings occasionally

Non-members/speakers/guests/sponsors

Each meeting includes approximately 33% of each type of attendee category. This breakdown is for a well-attended meeting, if a meeting is not as well-attended, the percentage for category a) member, increases.

Even though LA is a much larger chapter than EBO and has more attendees at each dinner meeting compared to EBO, the percentages were roughly the same in both total attendance and type of attendee category. I attended a chapter meeting in Portland last year (a very large membership with 60 to 80 members attending each meeting) and they said they had a similar total and category breakdown percentage of attendance.

What are factors affecting us and what is in our control and not in our control?

Networking opportunities. Give members a chance to talk with one another, be creative.

Benefits to members. Find out what is important to members.

Where do we want to be? Short term and Long term.

Short term, we want to increase membership participation in monthly meetings by 10% to 15%.

Long term, (we did not agree on what we wanted long term, we will keep working on this one). EBO will continue to reach out to other industry colleagues to increase participation, continue to offer free dinners to members (at least for this year) and build membership. We have increased membership.

Collect and analyze data from past meeting attendance. Categorize by program type

Base future programs on analysis of attendance and feedback from attendees.

Target invitations to non-members, allied industry groups.

Collect and track “how did you find out about the meeting” data

How do we know when we get there (and was it worth it)?

See the increase in member participation we planned for

What kind of effort did it take, what metrics were helpful, and not so helpful?

Follow up with improvements to process.

We decided that we will keep gathering data on this and share at the next WR Leadership Training Conference. EBO to keep in touch with Monique in LA.

Highlights of other work group report outs;

Redwood Empire

The chapter has several younger members taking leadership positions. Encourage all chapters to find program topics and resources for younger audiences, current technical issues. Listen to younger members, ask what they desire to see CSI provide.

San Francisco (LA, Fresno, Honolulu)

Getting members to meetings; have a regular meeting time/location. Get program announcement out on time.

Getting your chapter house in order; create an organization chart to go with your operating guide. Each board member has a committee or two. Each committee develops tasks, committee member does at least one task.

Breakdown the task efforts needed and make it clear to volunteers.

Santa Clara (Fresno, Honolulu)

Declining membership and revenue, doing well is 25-50% membership attendance at meetings. Need good programs

What is changing

Develop the CSI brand. Have a good “elevator speech”, define “what is CSI” in a few words.

Sacramento

CSI should market more to contractors. Design Build is becoming more popular

Don’t call them meetings, (party, event, program, forum, whatever)

Our electronic data (websites) should provide more useful information so we are seen as a resource.

We need to connect with local college faculty to get to the students. Even though CSI does not become more relevant to young professionals until mid-career, they know who CSI is.

CSI East Bay-Oakland Chapter President Dan Galvez gave a presentation on the growing importance of Social Media to CSI chapters. We encourage anyone who wants more information to check out the presentation and our follow up post on the topic. We believe that Social Media is an important method of increasing chapter and organization visibility to potential new members both now, and even more so in the future. This is a topic that we would like to expand on and hopefully get others involved in.

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The East Bay Oakland Chapter of CSI was incorporated in 1967, as a non-profit organization, dedicated to advancement of the objectives of CSI. Our education and networking events provide professional development opportunities for our design and construction industry colleagues.